We had a Googlephone at the Guardian today, but not officially: Vint Cerf came in to be grilled for lunch, and Google's excellent PR minder, Anthony House, was using his G1 for email. I was obviously concentrating on other things at the time, but it reminded me of the old Sidekick device, only much smaller. I'd guess anyone who has used earlier HTC phones with slide-out keyboards would spot the family resemblance, it seemed to be responsive, and it was certainly effective for making calls. But it also didn't look glamorous enough to attract iPhone, Nokia N95 or BlackBerry Curve/Bold users. As ZD Net's Matthew Miller puts it:

It has its strengths and weaknesses and is not bad for a first generation device, but it isn't the ground breaking, blow-me-away type of device I was looking for from Google and HTC.

Some of the G1's limitations are a bit bizarre. For example, it locks you to one Google account, and a lot of us have at least two (one business, one private). You can use the IMAP facility to run a second Gmail account, but it's less than ideal. Also, you can only watch YouTube videos -- and given the iPhone's shortcomings in the video department, you might have thought Flash would be an obvious feature.

The G1 also doesn't offer synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook, which is silly. The ability to cross-sync multiple devices via Outlook, and have them business-ready in a couple of minutes, is what keeps multiple device users sane. Synchronisation with Google is nice if you're a new born baby and have no prior attachments (or you're geek enough not to have a life), but people with a decade or two of baggage have usually got it stashed in Outlook. Miller says:

There is no support for Exchange or BlackBerry syncing services and no way to sync even to Outlook via a cable. There is no ability to tether the device to your laptop and I am not sure that developers will be able to provide this. You can view Office attachments sent in an email and they do look quite good, but there are no editing, zooming, or saving capabilities. I asked about a notes or task list application and was told for the 1000th time that developers may provide this. I think enterprise wants more control than this for security and standardization and it just isn't an enterprise device. Nothing syncs or connects to a PC and there is no central Google webpage to manage all your data or apps so you can quickly go to an "Android data management page", like there is for the Sidekick. Apps can only be purchased on the phone with no desktop option and the ability to back them up concerns me a bit.

If someone could put a G1 on a Microsoft Live Mesh ring, of course, some of those problems would be solved…..

It's also not clear how far it's locked to T-Mobile, though apparently you can get it unlocked after 90 days. This can be important if you travel, because you may well want to stick in a different SIM for use abroad.

The lack of a standard headphone jack is also a silly annoyance, particularly for people who use their mobile phones as music players.

Anyway, I've seen enough to know I won't be in the queue to buy one. And I suspect it won't be a long queue, unless T-Mobile follows the Orange Poland trick of paying actors to stand in line for iPhones….